Your Life's Work: A Choose Your Own Adventure

Pg. 1

You sit in a leather easy chair in your living room and you've just settled down with a book and glass of lemonade. Looking out the window you watch the heat vapors from the glaring summer sun rise off the pavement turning the outside world into an oven. You take a sip of your lemonade thankful you aren't out in the heat and set the cup on the coffee table in front of you. The glass perspires heavily, beads of water slide silently down pooling at the base of the cork table-coaster.

The book you're holding is supposed to be inspirational and motivating, given to you by a friend because she said you needed it. You immediately resented it as a call-out, but a few months down the road you've reconsidered it as the unsolicited offer of encouragement your friend originally intended. The dust jacket reads Your Life's Work; Securing Your Vision for a Life Well Spent. The cover picture is a photograph taken over the shoulder of a silhouetted man staring at a yellow sky, the sun partially obscured by an ocean's horizon. You can't decide whether the sun is rising or setting but you feel the distinction is important.

You open the book and skim through the forward, they've always bored you, and turn to chapter one. It reads:

You sit in a leather easy chair in your living room and you've just settled down with a book and glass of lemonade. Looking out the window you watch the heat vapors from the glaring summer sun rise off the pavement turning the outside world into an oven. You take a sip of your lemo- Ah.
The doorbell rings.

As you read the line you hear the doorbell chime. You sit for a moment staring at the book, thinking the chime sounded in your head, but the doorbell rings again and your neck turns cold. You stare at the book you hold in your hands regarding it like a stray cat who leapt from behind piled boxes in an alley to arch its back and hiss as you walked past. The doorbell chimes a third time and you can't ignore it. You lay the book on the coffee table with all the hesitance of releasing a poisonous snake within striking distance and wonder if you should answer the door. The book sits unmoving on the edge of the wooden table.

If you answer the door turn to page 14.
If you ignore the door and continue reading turn to page 22.
If you desire to set fire to your house with gasoline and oily rags turn to page 54.

- - -

Page 14:

Curiosity gets the better of you and you cut back the deadbolt opening the door a crack to see who's standing on your porch. You are greeted by the inexhaustibly pleasant smile of a young plump black woman wearing square rimmed glasses and holding paper copies of The Watchtower. “Hello,” she says in her Victorian inspired blouse with matching drab ankle length skirt and mundane black dress flats, “May I have a moment of your time?”

You heave a sigh of relief at the normality of the woman. 'The book was just a coincidence, like alarm clocks in dreams,' you think to yourself, 'Silly of me.'
You say, “Well I was just-”

“Won't take but a moment sir and isn't your eternal soul worth that much?” the Jehovah's Witness says with gentle determination, “Have you ever considered why so many people have stopped believing in God?”

If you answer the question turn to page 29.
If you make something up to get rid of her turn to page 33.
If you invite her in and introduce her to your 'god' turn to page 54.

- - -

Page 29:

The question is a standard Jehovah's Witness' barrage and normally you would say something like, “If God loved me he wouldn't have given me herpes,” or some other quip just to get rid of this librarian-like nuisance darkening your doorstep, but the strange coincidence with the book has made you unexpectedly talkative. So you say;

“Uh, yes actually. I've thought about that a lot. Recently. I think declining belief in God is due to increased scientific knowledge making humans more confident in their own control of the world and its functioning thereby eliminating a psychological need for a 'higher being' to explain those things humans don't understand, or can't control, while a rise in materialistic thought and a growing cultural expectation of immediate gratification has robbed human beings' of their desire to adhere to stifling religious laws with delayed, read: 'heavenly', gratification thereby contributing to disillusionment with the whole institute of church negating both the church's message and mission which is, in the end, spreading belief in God. It's a vicious cycle really.”

The Jehovah's Witness stares at you with blank eyes and a faltering smile, “Well. I-. I don-. You make some good points,” she holds out a copy of The Watchtower out of reflex, “Perhaps- perhaps we might talk about that, again, some other time. Later on. Some other day, some time,” she stammers.

You wrap your hand around the flimsy magazine just to get rid of her, “Sure. Some other time then,” you say. Just as your swinging the door shut she calls out, “God is real and he lo-,”You shut the door on her religious fervor.

You stare at the closed door for a moment crumpling the paper in your fists. You hadn't planned on saying that, it just spilled out, like buckets of water on carpet.

Your thoughts return to the yellow book resting on the coffee table. Tossing The Watchtower aside you settle uneasily back into the leather chair and take another sip of your sweating lemonade. You snatch up Your Life's Work, your hands smearing watery fingerprints across the pages. You hold the book for a moment, hesitant to pick up where you left off, so you open the book to a new page. The page is completely blank except for:

If you wish to continue reading turn to page 14.
If you want to know the answers turn to page 54.

Answers it says. You think the book is a liar but you thumb to page 54 anyways, using a finger to hold your place just in case it's a death page, just like you used to do as a kid.

- - -

You are strapped into the pilot's seat of a Saturn V rocket and you can hear the thrusters coming on line directly below you. A large LED counter positioned on the front console counts down from, “Ten.” A gentle robotic voice inside the cockpit states each number in unison with the mission controller's voice in your helmet's earpiece. “Ignition sequence start.” You feel a tense rumble as the center thruster ignites starting a chain reaction igniting the other four thrusters. A pit forms in your stomach, sweat beads up on your forehead and you feel a constricting pressure on your spine where your shoulder blades and neck meet. “Eight.” One gloved hand autonomously flips control switches and turns dials, your mind deferring to your meticulous training. Your other hand grips the armrest tighter. “Seven.” You feel the pressure down in your gut as the rocket's thrusters build power. Through the slanted cockpit windows you stare at the pale blue sky which seems to stretch into infinity. “Six.” The cockpit shakes violently, the thruster's pull you back into your seat as they cycle up.

“Five,” the voices chime in unison.

You sip your Starbuck's iced double mocha no whip through a wide mouthed straw holding the morning copy of the Los Angeles times under a California sun. A page seven headline reads: Cleric Approves Executions of Iranian Election Protesters. You glance at a photograph of two men dressed in dark nondescript clothes riding tandem on a dirt bike. The motorcycle is driving across a sidewalk bearing down on a scattered group of middle aged men and women, election protesters, in traditional Iranian garb. A solitary woman stands perplexed and on the verge of tears, her head inches from the motorcycle rider's swinging billy club. The photo and article would hold more interest for you if you were weren't sneaking glances across the room at a woman sipping black coffee in a black and white polka-dot wrap dress. Her head is bent low over the same newspaper and long ringlets of curly brown hair cascade over her shoulders framing a pale triangle of skin revealed by her low cut neckline. You take another sip of your iced coffee and mentally sort through prepared ice breakers. Oblivious, the woman in the polka-dot dress intently reads; President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad decried the violent protests that have erupted in Tehran calling for election dissenters and Mousavi supporters to disperse. Cleric Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami called for protest leaders to be “savagely and ruthlessly punished.” Distressed, she unintentionally holds her breath as she reads.

“Four.”

You're sitting in the clinic's waiting room staring at the carpeted floor wondering if this is going to hurt. You haven't started to show yet but your hands are drawn to your belly like magnets. Resting your open palm under your belly button you feel for movement, but it's too soon to feel anything. You wore your red and white Chuck Taylor's, the one comforting item in your closet that bolsters your confidence when you have none. The waiting room is silent aside from your nervous shuffle and you pick up a copy of Highlights for Kids off the magazine table. The presence of a children's magazine seems like a terrible mistake, a cruel joke in a clinic like this. You open to an article saying a packet of Kool-Aid added to your homemade playdough will make it smell good, but you're drawn to the accompanying photograph of children playing in a Martha Stewart-esque kitchen. A little boy with brown hair has smudges of flower on his nose, a little blonde girl rubs the playdough out with a rolling pin, an infant boy sits on the floor with a toothy baby grin, his hands and face covered in spilled flour, and you ask your belly, which one would you look like? A nurse steps into the waiting room and calls your name. We're ready for you, she says smiling pleasantly. A lightning flash of doubt splits the self-assuredness you held when you walked through the clinic's doors and as you stand to meet the nurse you cluthch the Highlights magazine against your stomach like a lifeline, like an umbilical chord.

“Three.”

You adjust the knot in your tie, straighten your jacket, check your breath against the palm of your hand. You're throat is dry but you rub your sweaty palms on your slacks. The hotel door, room 312, looms in front of you like Moses' stone tablets themselves. You raise your hand to knock. Your wife's face suddenly flashes through your mind and you think of the weekend you spent with her at the beach, alone for once, laying in white cotton sheets feeding each other chocolate covered strawberries. The memory pulls your closed fist away from the door even as you push the thought aside. Denise is waiting for you behind door 312. Attractive, attentive, intriguing, and seductive Denise from accounting. Single Denise. Exciting Denise. Just the thought of Denise works your nerve back up and you raise your fist to the door again. It suddenly occurs to you, a thought flashes through your mind arriving as a fully formed image, you see that the hinges of door 312 are tethered to another door, a far away unseen door, and if you open door 312 the other door will close forever. The unseen door once led to your wife, once led to weekends spent between white cotton sheets. Now you're not sure where that door leads and it scares you. Door 312 is definite. Door 312 leads to Denise and the immediate promise of her open thighs, of her desire, of her attention. But, you think, choosing one door, one woman, will immediately separate you from the other. Your wife's face flashes across your mind again, radiantly golden and silhouetted by midmorning sunlight. Hesitant and hovering inches from the woodgrain of door 312 you clench and unclench your fist.

“Two.”

You're singing along to Bob Dylan's The Ballad of Hollis Brown blaring out of the car speakers when you hear the *POP* overshadow the plucking guitar. It's an abrupt sound, a slight but indefinably dangerous sound. A sound of finality. You feel the rear end of the car slip from behind you and in an instant you realize the *POP* was the rear driver's side tire blowing out. In truth the tread has separated from the wheel and been flung into the adjacent lane leaving a bald rubber sphere spinning against the freeway tarmac at 82 mph. Time sort of freeze frames and you lock both white-knuckled hands onto the steering wheel, not because the wheel will let you steer the car out of danger, it's too late for that, but because the wheel is the only representation of control available to you. The only thing that might assure you everything is going to be allright. Inertia pulls you towards the passenger seat as the rear end slides away to the left. Your heart rate jumps. Your foot feels like lead hovering above the gas pedal unable to act. You watch the clear picture of the roadway in the windshield dissolve into a smeared swipe of colors. Your car completes two full rotations across four empty lanes of freeway until your eyes lock onto the steel-girded guardrail reaching from the road's shoulder to meet you like motherly arms embracing a child. You are utterly helpless to prevent the impact. Your mind locks up as if your thoughts were being flung away by the car's spinning and you close your eyes, but even as the metal siding of your car crunches into the unyielding guard rail Bob Dylan croons; There's seven people dead on a South Dakota farm, somewhere in the distance there's seven new people born.

“One.”

The bottoms falls out of your stomach and suddenly you're falling.

“Zero. All engines running. Launch commit.”

The Saturn V rocket lifts from the launch pad pushing you further into the padded seat. You feel a release in your nerves. Your hands now rest calmly on the chair's arms, your heart settles into a steady rhythm. “Liftoff. We have liftoff. Launch tower cleared,” the voice in your ear says. The sky darkens above you, as you move through the layers of atmosphere, opening itself and releasing you from the choke hold of gravity. The cockpit shakes violently and the noise from the burning rockets renders all but the voice in your earpiece inaudible. The tension between your shoulder blades drops diffusing into your arms and legs. “We have Max Q,” you feel yourself saying. You are fully committed and 45 seconds away from stage one separation. Just beyond that is the Kármán line and then, as you peel back the layers of thermoosphere, the universe will reveal to you all her secrets. Through your tiny cockpit window you see the first twinkling stars in the distance and you whisper, “Hail Mary full of grace.”

- - -

Page 54
















End.